


Some Things Just Get Under My Skin

by welcometomyasylum



Series: Doctor Who Grumblings [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: ranting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 20:48:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/welcometomyasylum/pseuds/welcometomyasylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been getting on my nerve lately, the number of people who have just been hating on doctor who and Moffat and the 50th..<br/>So, to start off, let’s talk about Moffat. I understand that a lot of choices he’s made aren’t perfect and that not everyone is happy with him as a writer, but I have heard people talking about how he doesn’t know the Doctor and that bothers me. I mean, how does he not? This quote explains everything we need to know about the Doctor.<br/>“When they made this particular hero, they didn’t give him a gun, they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn’t give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter, they gave him a call box from which you can call for help. And the didn’t give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat ray, they gave him an extra heart. They gave him two hearts. And that’s an extraordinary thing; there will never come a time when we don’t need a hero like the doctor.”<br/>- Steven Moffat<br/>That is the Doctor. That is all that he is, he is a hero that fixes things and shows compassion for other people above all else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Things Just Get Under My Skin

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't read this through a lot and it's kind of just a few of my grumbles about people's responses to the 50th Anniversary and the Doctor Who series and Moffat.

It’s been getting on my nerve lately, the number of people who have just been hating on doctor who and Moffat and the 50th..  
So, to start off, let’s talk about Moffat. I understand that a lot of choices he’s made aren’t perfect and that not everyone is happy with him as a writer, but I have heard people talking about how he doesn’t know the Doctor and that bothers me. I mean, how does he not? This quote explains everything we need to know about the Doctor.  
“When they made this particular hero, they didn’t give him a gun, they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn’t give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter, they gave him a call box from which you can call for help. And the didn’t give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat ray, they gave him an extra heart. They gave him two hearts. And that’s an extraordinary thing; there will never come a time when we don’t need a hero like the doctor.”  
\- Steven Moffat  
That is the Doctor. That is all that he is, he is a hero that fixes things and shows compassion for other people above all else.  
The next thing is I don’t think some people understand exactly what was shown during the 50th episode or they just don’t think of it the way that I understand it to be. One post that I read talked about how Moffat thought that the doctor couldn't be trusted to know how many times he has regenerated and to remember key facts about his past regenerations and talked about how the Doctor should know that he is just doing adventures every week for our amusement and that he doesn’t need to have a purpose and that all that Moffat is doing is breaking down the Doctor to remake him in his own vision. I want to respond to all of these at the same time because I think that they all go with the same general point that I would like to make.  
First of all, if the Doctor had no purpose and was literally just an adventure a week kind of show then it wouldn’t have grown into the amazing work of genius that it is today. It would have been written off in many ways merely because it wasn't deep enough to survive in today's television culture. It would have already exhausted the plot possibilities and viewers would have found something new. It would have turned into Glee which is just badly written fluff (though it is a highly addicting crack of a show) and the older whovians wouldn’t like it as much and the viewers wouldn’t be nearly invested enough in the show.  
Next, it’s not that Moffat wanted the Doctor to break down and that the Doctor can’t be trusted to remember his life, it’s that the Doctor is actually going through real human emotions, albeit slower than a human would because he is a timelord and time doesn’t feel the same to him as it does to us. Think about it, Nine came back, directly from the Time War and he was pretty much just angry and angsty and very, very ready to kill anyone he felt was in the wrong. He felt the need to punish and to hurt. He did hide it with a sarcastic and witty personality, but it was there. Then we move on to Ten and, as explained in the 50th, he is the one who regrets. He regrets the time war and he feels as if everything he does just makes things worse and he spends a lot of time feeling sorrowful and hurt and counting all of the ways that he fucked up. Again, he tries to hide all of this underneath his humor and promises to give each companion an adventure. These reactions being trademark personality traits for the Doctor. Then we move on to Eleven who is one of the most well thought out Doctors in my opinion. Yes, he is dark and he is kind of just at that point where he is done with everything and he makes a lot of rash decisions, but he still maintains the quirk that the other Doctors have all had. The way that he copes with the Time War is by trying to forget that it happened. He just forgets everything that hurts him. Like how many times he’s regenerated and how many years he has lived as THE ONLY TIMELORD LEFT or how many of his companions have died or left or how he finds people that light up his life but they always end up leaving him to return to their lives or their true loves or any number of reasons. All three of the “new Doctors” show possible coping methods and I love that they explored this because with every regeneration we explore a slightly different personality and every personality will deal with loss in a different way and from here our options were either he accepts it and moves on in some way and we start watching an actual adventure of the week type show or we find some new purpose that will make the Doctor actually happy and able to accept everything that has happened so that he can live the rest of his life in a better way.  
This is where my next bother comes in.. A few posts that I have read talk about how the Doctor would never agree to go find Galifrey because he would never move back to Galifrey. This just bothers me because, yes, the Doctor did leave Galifrey and he did it for a very good reason and he would never go back to stay. But he also has been coping with the fact that he made the decision to kill his entire race and planet and everything else and even though the council is corrupt, there were innocents on that planet. There were kids. Even though he left and he would never move back doesn’t mean that he wants them to remain in a frozen pocket of time like a painting in a gallery. No one deserves to be paused in a moment of fear. In a moment where they, the citizens of Galifrey know that they are all about to be EXTERMINATED by the daleks and that the daleks will continue to kill all other species to dominate. Especially the innocents, the people, the kids who didn’t cause the war to happen or the parents of those kids that have nothing to do with the corruption of their leaders.  
So, yes, the Doctor is going to go find and try to save Galifrey and he will have splendid adventures on his way there, but it is not to move there and just blindly rejoin that society. He is doing it to save the children that made Nine so angry with himself. The children that made Ten regret every mistake that he has ever made and every difficult choice that he was forced to make. The children that made Eleven so depressed that, in order to feel any happiness, he had to forget chunks of his life and forget how many years that he has been alone, just helping other people move on with their lives, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.  
Moffat and the other writers of Doctor Who aren’t breaking the Doctor down just so that they can do whatever they want with him. They are actually letting him work through his pain. They are showing how, even though Nine was struggling along and pretending that his composure was perfectly there, he fell to regret (Ten) and he began collapsing and blaming himself and feeling sorrow over everything he had done and torturing himself with the exact facts of everything that he had done wrong or that he perceived himself doing wrong until he finally just gave up and began forgetting (Eleven) everything that was bad about his life and trying to just go through the motions of believing that everything is perfectly fine and that nothing that goes wrong is his fault until that shatters and he is actually given that opportunity to go back and fix the cause of all that he has been coping with. And he does that in such a way that he still goes through all of the emotions that he went through to get to this point because he knows that those adventures were what gave him the knowledge and the depth that he has now. He doesn’t completely change everything in the course of history. He makes little tweaks that he can explore later so that time is restored and in a better way that it was before.  
Through his adventures I would like to believe that he has gained so much more insight into the daleks and into emotions so that he can actually change Gallifrey and make the universe whole again. Then, once Gallifrey is back, he will no longer feel the guilt and hurt and angst that he felt after destroying the entire planet and whether or not he will be moving there to live happily ever after is regardless of the fact that this gigantic weight will be lifted off of his shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to share all of these feels with whoever will listen and I understand that I am not allknowing and maybe I just read things differently than other people but some of the comments that I have been reading lately just really get under my skin and I just really don’t like hate things when I don’t understand how that hate is justified.


End file.
